This guy was maybe being a goofball, but they didn’t need to light his ass up.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…God help anybody who ever turns a taser on me. I do believe that’s the kind of provocative act that would end with me torturing you to death.
ATS Premium: Barksdale Missile Number Six: The Stolen Nuclear Weapon, page 1
I don’t know how rigorous this guy is (I’m not saying he’s not, I merely don’t know his reputation), but there are some interesting points in here… particularly that the military’s admission of error in loading real nukes onto those planes last week was actually a very deliberate leak — one designed to scare the shit out of the Iranians. Which makes sense to me, as covering up such a thing (or at least stubbornly denying the whole thing) seems more in line with trad U.S. military policy.
Hell, I wonder if there were actually any nukes at all. From what I understand, “accidentally” loading nuclear missiles onto a plane is a fairly difficult mistake to make.
More recording tonight — specifically, guitar for “Entropy”, which has somehow morphed from sounding like Bloc Party’s “Compliments” to something more akin to a cross between Talking Heads and Daft Punk.
We could only come up with a rhythm guitar part — a high, staccato, repetitive thing that sounds like half the disco punk out there — but then, at home afterwards, I found some noodling Thom had done that — when looped and run through distortion — turned into a cool verse lead guitar. So we’ll re-record that bit, along with a bit for the chorus that’s in the same vein, and I think we’ll be done with the guitar for that song. At some point, I’m gonna throw an ARP 2600 line into it at the sixteen-bar break, because I think it’s cooler to have an arpeggiated synth line (maybe run through a wah and chopped around) than a guitar solo.
Thom’s playing most of the guitar on this one — we’re just recording it at his apartment, amped and miked. Apparently it doesn’t bother his neighbors.
Side note: one of the fun things about getting together to play is pulling tracks out of the iPod and going “Like, hear how that guitar line goes? All angular? Like that.” Tonight we listened to Bloc Party’s “Banquet” and Talking Heads’ “Houses In Motion” — if you know those songs you might be able to imagine what “Entropy” is starting to sound like. But not really. Heh.
Best moment: in the car on the way to his apartment, Thom and I were talking about recognizing sources of samples. He put on an extremely obscure album of African chant…and I was totally delighted to recognize the background of Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole”, and to realize that what I always though was some sort of percussive synth was actually some African dude going “Huh! Huh! Hah!”.
Where were you when the world was made? I was still drunk from the night before I heard the sound of the Big Bang And I staggered to the door I saw the whole of Creation I saw the master plan We made kings of monkeys When we put the thumbs on their hands
(Edit: Hell, I made this sample for Thom, so I’ll throw it up here: MP3 snippet of “Entropy”, unfinished.
(Also from May 2004. Hee hee hee.) Globalist Sex Ravings From A Drug-Addled Subversive, vol. 666
I have imbibed roughly four times the recommended dosage of the hallucinogenic compound 2-CI (still legal, as of 6:15 this morning, folks). Sweet rampant returning Messiah, I am absolutely fucked to the gills. I spent five minutes staring at the print of Munch’s The Scream that we keep on our bathroom wall (apparently as some sort of gastrointestinal inspiration). The goddamned electric blue highlights kept popping out at me.
Stereolab is playing on the surround sound system and I am feeling terribly Pop right now — probably not least of all because I’ve been reading my favorite issue of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, “And We Are All Policemen”. Somewhere in this blog I once quoted that issue — “Pop, like Chronos the Titan, always eats its’ own darlings.”
Goddamned right. King Mob is Jerry Cornelius and so am I. I am a Dangerous Subversive, goddamnit. I am a refugee of the Prada-Meinhof generation. Terrorism is acceptable so long as it is Eurotrash. Actually, anything is acceptable so long as it is Eurotrash.
I am a Furniture Terrorist! I bring the dangerous ideas of Scandanavian industrial designers into this country via revolutionary samizdat and spread them to the unwashed masses of lumpenWalMartariats who cringe in their upholstered deck chairs and look in wonder upon my Chic! Republican girls want to slather my penis with their unholy corrosive saliva! Somewhere, one random nubile Bush girl or another (Jenna or Barbara, I care not) thinks of me when she slips her Official Ollie North Bath Soap (in the shape of an illegally sold Scud missile) below the waterline of her pampered toilette!
I am heavily into Rock Star self-identification right now, oh my droogs and droogettes — and why the fuck not? If that little M. Butterfly motherfucker William Hung can get the Bling-Bling tossed at him by a nation grateful for his witless crooning, why not Dr. Ellis? Why not, indeed!
The world needs a baritone right now. This is a baritonic millenium! Not the fey sopranos of Icelandic sissy-boys for this era, nossir! Men! With balls! Singing songs about self-abusive German society women and the depersonalized geek culture of Northern California!
(And be grateful that I’m documenting my scattered train of thought with the sacred A HREF, you peasants. I’m trying to help you. But don’t buy those songs yet, until I upload the new remastered versions, which are Definitive. Brian Wilson can smiley-smile on my beautiful lingam.)
Christ, my skull is soaring and my stomach is swooping and these goddamned French women are babbling at me in their heathen tongue over extremely sociopathic Moog disco. Why have I chosen this terrible music? It’s the sound of a Charles de Gaulle airport lounge in 2015 if the Nazis had won and taken over all those years ago. “Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere,” they are singing in between their horrible Gallic ravings…somewhere, Merhan Nasseri is hiding under a plastic lounge chair in a frenzy, surrounded by Freedom Fries from the departure terminal’s McDonalds and praying to Allah in frenzied Farsi. Or Iranian. Or whatever the fuck it is he speaks.
Have I ever told you, my interglobal audience, of my uncontrollable desire during the mid to late 1990s to bang the holy ass off of Sporty Spice? I’m talking full on Mickey Rourke sex here, in some anonymous Third World five star hotel where all the furnishings are covered in cheap brown wood Con-Tact paper and the waiters all wear black gloves. Me and Mel C, under the orange paisley sheets, feeding each other lox and opium bagels off of one another’s shaved genitalia…her moans as I trace the lines of her track pants with my tongue before removing them with a straight razor…the horrified whispers of her fellow Spiceians when she returns from her sojourn in Addis Ababa with a triply-pierced perineum and a sudden devotion to the more baroque practices of Sufism…my absolute refusal to speak of her in interviews, only looking fondly out the window and playing Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” on a boombox whenever the subject is mentioned…. Melanie, I still haven’t forgotten you, though Blighty and the scattered remnants of Empire might have. I love my girlfriend but you are ever in my thoughts, mein liebchen.
I never fancied any of the other Spice Girls, though Geri Halliwell looked like she might be good for a tumble or two — the Baby one was far too Roman Polanski, the Scary one was just too unthreatening and the…who’s the other one, still famous but now for no apparent reason, married some homosexual rugby player or something…she was just…ugh. Looked like all the girls I used to sport-fuck in high school. Student Council types who were all stuck up until you got their panties off, at which point they turned into total skanks, as it should be.
Christ. Too many horrible perverted thoughts in high school. It was that horrible Trent Reznor that did it — all those nights sitting around in my trailer in the snows of Montana, listening to “The Only Time” over and over and jacking off furiously, wishing I could tap the ass of one of the local alterna-rock girls, though I never did. (I’d name names, believe me, but you wouldn’t give a mad fuck and more to the point I’m terrified that they read the Interweb, and that I’d subject them to the vision of the 14 year old me, chubby and half my head shaven, my bleach-spattered Bugle Boy overalls around my ankles as I sweatily wanked into sweet oblivion with their pimply adolescent faces scrawled across my corpus callosum, writhing in utterly imaginary yet semi-realistic ecstasy at my very touch. Shit, you know who you are, take it as a compliment and move on with your life. You’ll never have better at any rate, and you never even got to touch me.)
The French women are stimulating me unnecessarily. Must switch music. Over to iTunes….
Shit! Almost clicked over to John Lee Hooker, at which point I would have had to have moved to New Orleans and had sex with half the Goth population immediately, including the literary ones. Luckily I managed to get on the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy in time. This still reminds me of early 90s alterna-chick-sex, though.
But then again, what doesn’t, these days? Those were heady times for those of us who were 13 and 14 when Nirvana came out. I was just hip enough to see Nirvana as the rising crest of a tide I’d already caught, with the Pixies and the Femmes and the Lemonheads and Concrete Blonde and Nine Inch Nails. Back then, all the girls had purple hair and black fingernails and would dance around lazily in the basements of their parents’ houses to “Bloodletting” while the rest of us smoked pot and talked about how fucking intricate H.R. Giger’s paintings were and how cool Robert Anton Wilson was. And I was 14, folks. I was fucking hep, lemme tell you.
But those days are long gone; alterna-Pop has been Balkanized, and none of you remember it or give a fuck about it anyway, those dead days when all we wanted was to fuck Juliana Hatfield and work as an A&R geek for SubPop. You love your Britney and your Justin and your masturbatory pop icons.
All I ever wanted was to be Dave Kendall. I wanted to be the sleek-headed Eurotrash guy who got to hang out with the rock stars. I spent a few years doing that in the 1990s, and you know what? Rock stars are dicks. They have an overinflated sense of self-worth which is as totally undeserved in their cases as it is justly deserved in mine.
So Evan Dando actually did get to fuck Juliana Hatfield, so what? He was a prick to me at a big Almost-Acoustic Christmas show in San Jose in ’96, and nobody remembered who he was but me, anyway. The audience was there for Lou Barlow, who totally replaced Evan as Alternahunk of the Decade, and the only person who sang along with “It’s A Shame About Ray” was my sorry ass, sitting in the press area with my Mondo 2000 credentials and my memories — only a few years old then — of sitting around in my friend Sarah’s laundry room with my friends Nate Varnum and Jeremy Snyder, tentatively playing that self-same song on my mom’s acoustic guitar and wishing I could be Evan Dando. He got to fuck Juliana Hatfield (while vehemently denying it all the while) and hang out with Johnny Depp and be on the cover of cool magazines, and I was some dorky fat kid living in Hamilton, Montana. The least the motherfucker could have been was gracious when I went backstage to tell him thanks.
Of course now he’s off milking his blood for heroin remnants in Australia or something and I’m here, tripping my balls off and babbling at you with my PowerBook while the Reid brothers yell over my surround sound system. My drugs are better, Evan, the sun is good and truly risen, and I’d like to think I’ve gotten it out of my system…but I haven’t really and, God willing, I never will. I have replaced Evan Dando and Lou Barlow as the Counterculture Sexy Boy of this coming aeon, and I will rise to my ascendancy on a wave of mutilation. Wa-a-a-a-ave. W-a-a-a-ave.
I am a deranged cocksucker and plan to be until the Man finally kicks the door down and comes to haul me away…at which point I will laugh at him and demand to see his papers. For I am nothing if not thorough.
Good morning to you all.
(Written in 2004 when I was on…shit, was it mescaline or 5-MEO-DMT? Or just mushrooms? Acid? Can’t remember. Drugs. Enjoy.)
Parthenogenesis – A Love Story
I learned to fuck in Nicosia. Turkish Cyprus, you dig.
They called her a “polymorph” but that just meant she was anything you wanted. Some of us wanted boys, and she was a boy, just like that. They’d fuck her/him in the ass and listen to Transformer on remastered Windows Media Audio and think themselves decadent.
For some of us, she was a girl. They’d fuck her/her in the ass just like the others did, only they’d listen to T-Rex on vinyl and think themselves macho.
The guys in the lab learned how to get blackly drunk very quickly. They’d stumble in after they’d been thrown out of a dozen casinos and call us monsters, using their research as some cheap toy. We would invariably beat the piss out of them and leave them down on the beaches for the heroin dealers to find when they brought in their fresh shipments every morning right before dawn.
For me, she was smooth. Nothing. A translucent membrane, opening to the Mediterranean breeze. You could see things moving around inside of her, and when she orgasmed she would light up internally like the phosphorescent algae on the rocks below, and her surfaces would arch and spindle improbably like Hilbert space.
And now I live inside her, and look out through these crystal walls at the blue sky and the azure ocean. I can taste the pheremones in the air like sizzling fire, and I know what love is.
(Dedicated to Lou and Evan and all the kids at Cody High. Man, I swear I’d give the whole thing up for you.)
My friend Mike Bernstein emailed me to tell me that big chunks of the ZA archives are available on Archive.org. While hunting around, I discovered this entry from October 8, 2003.
I told you I was ahead of the game on multitouch systems.
Which reminds me of a question I’ve been wanting to ask for a while: does anybody know if there are any OSes or GUIs out there that recognize multiple pointing devices? Because I really want to try out some ideas I’ve had that would utilize such a system. I’m not talking about simply hooking up two different mice here; that’s essentially what the Wacom does (pen and mouse). I’m talking about having two different cursors, each one controlled by a different mouse. Obviously this has vast gaming potential; most 3DFPS games allow you to control your weapon targeting with the mouse and your movement with the keyboard. But that’s not what I have in mind. Imagine, for example, a modified pen tablet, where instead of holding a pen, you wear a fingertip. You have two of these, one for each hand, one on each side of your keyboard. Instead of selecting text line by line, you simply put one finger at the top left corner of the text you want to select and the other finger at the bottom right. Or, if you have multiple pages to select (as I often do), one finger holds down the selection and the other scrolls. Or you’re surfing the web. One finger does all the clicking, the other does all the navigation (scrolling, backwards and forwards through history, etc.) through gesture-based interaction. You don’t have to worry about holding down command keys or anything else — one hand interacts with the text, the other interacts with the chrome, in much the same way that speedreaders use one finger to scan the text and the other hand to turn the pages. One incredibly useful application of this tech would be to denote connections between onscreen data. For example: using an app like DENIM, you could throw up a flowchart and begin drawing links immediately and much more easily than you can with a keyboard and mouse. In point of fact, a two-handed interaction system like the one I’m describing would effectively replace the keyboard for 90% of computing applications. People are much better at two-finger typing than they are at thumb typing; imagine if, when you had a text input, a small Key Caps-style keyboard popped up at the bottom of the screen and you two-finger-typed your URL or filename or whatever. You’d only really use the keyboard when you needed to input long strings of text…if you were a touch typist, that is, or a half-assed hybrid like me (I use my left index finger and pinkie, my first three right fingers and my thumb to type, and I can do about fifty words a minute, sometimes more). I can think of a thousand uses for this. Apparently, so can academics. Of course, like most academic research, there’s nothing that seems to actually be downloadable or useful. There seems to be a driver for Windows 98, but that’s it. The only functional stuff I’ve found while Googling this subject are some C code samples and a few of demo executables for old versions of Windows. Nothing, in other words, that’s ready for prime time. I don’t know enough about compiled coding or GUI programming to even think about fucking with this stuff, but I can make a few educated guesses: * The hardware aspect is trivial. I suspect this because if I plug two mice into my Mac, they’ll both work at the same time (albeit interfering with one another). I seem to remember that the same thing is true of Windows XP. So the problem would be isolating the input from each USB device. * You’d have to work around the stupidity of the GUI coders…which means that your best bet would be to work in X-Windows, since you have access to the code. Identifying the mouse drivers in X-Windows and modding them would probably be easier than trying to do the same thing in MS-Windows. I’m not saying easy, I’m saying easier. * Your main problem would be adding another cursor. I would think that most apps (not including those, like graphics apps, which actively react to cursor location) wouldn’t take a shit if you had multiple cursors clicking. All they recognize is that something has been clicked. * Having said this, you’d probably want to write some new apps that take real advantage of the possibilities of multi-input interaction. I don’t know. Programming is hard. But do this, future entrepreneur, and I guarantee you’ll have a hit on your hands (both of them). Just give me credit for thinking it up. Not money, mind you, just credit. And a free unit.
I am Future Boy, predicter of novelty interfaces.
Falafa-y’all (or “redneck falafel”) is my own invention. It’s basically falafel made with a Tex-Mex/Southwestern feel. It can be served as an appetizer, on a tortilla or pita bread, or with a sauce. (I’m developing a buttermilk chipotlé sauce, which I’ll put up here when I’ve perfected it.) It’s relatively easy to make and a kick-ass addition to Mexican/Tex-Mex, Southern, or California fusion cuisine.
INGREDIENTS (Spices are approximate, YMMV)
4 cans garbanzo beans 1 can kernel corn 1 can black beans 1/2 cup roasted red peppers or pimentos 2 tbsp cumin 2 tbsp red chili powder 1 tbsp garlic salt 1 tbsp cayenne pepper 1 tbsp black pepper 1/2 cup olive oil 2 1/2 cups flour
DIRECTIONS
Mash or puree garbanzo beans into a thick paste. Place in large bowl. Add 2 1/2 cups of flour (more or less, depending upon desired dryness — more flour equals drier falafa-y’all). Stir until thoroughly mixed into an almost dough-like substance.
Drain corn and black beans and pour into bowl. Chop red peppers into small pieces (or open and drain pimentos, which amounts to the same thing) and pour into bowl. Add olive oil and all seasonings. Fold with wooden spoon until mixture is complete.
Form mixture into 1″ to 2″ balls and flatten slightly. At this point, you can either cook them in a skillet with 1/2″ of oil or deep fry them. Either way, cook until deep golden brown, remove from heat and drain oil on a plate with paper towels. Serve.
Serves 5-10 people. You can also freeze the mixture or uncooked balls for later serving.
Working Flow Field # 1 from jzellis and Vimeo.
I’ll post a simple explanation of how I made this work in the next few days; the code that keeps the particles within a certain radius of the control particle is actually totally simple, and done in something like five lines of code.
I’m so stoked! Months of beating my head, and I finally see something that looks the way I want it to!
Barnes & Noble to sell Simpson book in stores – Yahoo! News
“If I Did It,” in which the former U.S. football star offers a hypothetical account of his ex-wife’s murder, has caused a firestorm of controversy since it was revealed last November that Simpson worked with a ghostwriter to author it. Simpson was acquitted of murder charges in 1995, but was later found liable for the killings in a civil trial and ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages to the victims’ families.
You know what? I don’t care if Ron Goldman’s family won the rights to this in court. And downloading it for free off the Web, out of morbid curiosity, is one thing.
But if you actually go out and purchase a copy of this book, you’re officially a piece of shit human being. I don’t care what excuse you make up for yourself about why you’d pay money to find out exactly how this cocksucker hacked a couple of people to death and got away with it, courtesy of an extremely expensive defense team and a Los Angeles jury terrified of starting another set of riots.
You’re a prurient ghoul and you’re a piece of shit human being, and I’ll cheerfully tell you that to your face if I ever see you with a copy of this book.
Let it die, for God’s sake.